Sunday, August 31, 2014

I should like to add to this something noteworthy about the memory that we keep after death, something that convinced me that not just the general contents but even the smallest details that have entered our memory do last and are never erased. I saw some books with writing in them like earthly writing, and was told that they had come from the memories of the people who had written them, that not a single word was missing that had been in the book they had written in the world. I was also told that all the least details could be retrieved from the memory of someone else, even things the person had forgotten in the world.

The reason for this was explained as well; namely, that we have an outer and an inner memory, the outer proper to our natural person and the inner proper to our spiritual person. The details of what we have thought, intended, said, and done, even what we have heard and seen, are inscribed on our inner or spiritual memory. There is no way to erase anything there, since everything is written at once on our spirit itself and on the members of our body, as noted above. This means that our spirit is formed in accord with what we have thought and what we have done intentionally. I know these things seem paradoxical and hard to believe, but they are true nevertheless.

Let no one believe, then, that there is anything we have thought or done in secret that will remain hidden after death. Believe rather that absolutely everything will come out into broad daylight.
—Emmanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, pg. 498(new century edition)

In reviewing the question of sensation and the organic sense of Being, I must once again emphasize that this matter relates to the infusion of angelic energies into the body. De Salzmann referred to this as a "higher" energy; but of course it's an angelic energy.

Calling it "higher" simply tends, in my eyes, to obscure the point. One cannot understand what this "higher" energy means without understanding that it comes from a level of real Being, populated with other real Beings. We must, as well, be reminded that this higher level is a level not just of location—we're not dealing in mere geometries here—but of a greater moral, ethical, and spiritual authority. Hence Swedenborg's succinct comment:I could therefore see that our overall nature depends on the nature of our intention and consequent thought, so that evil people are their own evil and good people are their own good. (ibid)

We do not seek inner development for any other reason than to serve the good; and this is an action of unselfishness. Whatever we love the most, we are; and whatever we are, we own. The essential action of awakening the organic sense of Being is to give ourselves the opportunity to see what we arewithin this life, so that we can make informed (inwardly formed) choices about ourselves while there is still time to change. Angelic inspection, you see, can be used to effect inner change while we are still alive; but once we die, those changes are no longer possible, because a final then reckoning takes place. Gurdjieff alluded to this on a number of occasions.

When I explained this to my wife, she asked about reincarnation and recurrence. My reply to her was that this doesn't matter; regardless of how we wish to view that question, it represents nothing more than a turning part in the engine. It isn't the whole vehicle; or the destination. Perhaps this is why Gurdjieff showed so little interest in the question.

In receiving the angelic energies that impart a new level of connection to sensation, I agree to participate in this inspection of myself from the inward perspective; and all of the things that make me, both in the past and now, come together within the organic manifestation of this energy which can see. It sees not with the eyes, or the mind, but with subtler parts which connect to heaven; and this sense is a part of the nervous system itself, which has both spiritual and natural elements. The human nervous system is (as both Gurdjieff & Swedenborg recognized) connected to both the spiritual and natural level. Gurdjieff preferred to describe it mostly in terms of chemistry, but Swedenborg understood from the point of view of neuroanatomy and correspondence.

No matter. From either man's point of view, what we are —and everything we ever have been—is indelibly inscribed in the nervous system of the body, and remains available as a comprehensive organic impression of Being. That comprehensive organic impression, however, remains unavailable for as long as we lack an organic sense of Being. And only this process of angelic inspection can help weld the various impressions of "self" and "I" into any kind of unity, since—exactly as in the process of death and its aftermath—only the stripping away of all the artificial, false, and outward parts of one's nature (the revelation of the truth, the exposure to broad daylight, as Swedenborg explains it)—can reveal any meaningful inner truth to a person.

Sensation, in other words, is the essential element in self-remembering: and yet it is understood far more as a mere mechanical process in humans than as any kind of intelligent—let alone angelic—action.

The organic sense of Being is, if properly sensed and understood, immediately sensed as an angelic presence. It is, at that, one of the coarsest and most basic forms of angelic manifestation, yet it is already immeasurably higher than our ordinary level of Being.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

“When we are being faced with our deeds after death, angels who have been given the task of examining look searchingly into the face and continue their examination through the whole body, beginning with the fingers first of one hand and then of the other and continuing through the whole. When I wondered why this was so, it was explained to me. The reason is that just as the details of our thought and intention are inscribed on our brains because that is where their beginnings are, so they are inscribed on the whole body as well, since all the elements of our thought and intention move out into the body from their beginnings and take definition there in their outmost forms. This is why the things that are inscribed on our memory from our intention and consequent thought are inscribed not only on the brain but also on the whole person, where they take form in a pattern that follows the pattern of the parts of the body. I could therefore see that our overall nature depends on the nature of our intention and consequent thought, so that evil people are their own evil and good people are their own good.

Some readers have asked me exactly what sensation is; and although I use words to describe the organic sense of Being in terms of its immediate practical use to the art of Being, and emphasize its essential nature in many essays, there has never been, to the best of my knowledge, an exposition of why this kind of sensation exists, what its cosmological nature consists of, and why it is necessary to develop this sense.

There are, in fact, specific answers at hand to this question; they don't exist hidden behind a veil in a land of secret, unspeakable mysteries, but have pragmatic implications related to the nature of Being, Heaven, and Hell.

In order to examine this question, we will need to delve deeper into some of Swedenborg's material, and understand its relationship to what Gurdjieff said in more detail.

The description Swedenborg begins with above, of the angelic examination of the body starting with the fingertips, is not given casually. The process of angelic inspection of Being, which has both spiritual and natural characteristics, takes place through sensation; that is, it is physical, sensory, and nonverbal. It is a penetration of the body by higher intelligence.

The manifestation of sensation in the human body, insofar as it manifests at a voluntary or intelligent level, is a direct manifestation of the angelic kingdoms. It represents real contact with, and energy received from, a higher level.

The potential for this contact is definitely not restricted to existence after death. Swedenborg described the entry of angelic and heavenly energies as the inflow; and active sensation is a specific manifestation of the inflow which brings together the sensory materials of the body, including its awareness and memories, and realigns them into a new relationship with the divine.

The infusion of angelic energies into the earthly body is, of course, an imperfect blend; yet without this infusion, any self-remembering which takes place is artificial, that is, inorganic. It has no properties of life, because it does not emanate from this process of inspection which can only be undertaken by the angelic order. Life outside the infusion of this angelic energy is thus referred to as death in the Gospels; and all of a person's effort to awaken must revolve around the wish to awaken this process of angelic introspection during one's lifetime. Not later.

The organic sense of Being, in other words, is the reception of angelic energies and their incorporation into the physical structure of self-examination. The yoga schools (which explain these phenomena in what I feel are somewhat inadequate ways) call the "points" at which these energies are received nadis; but what they are and why we have them is not exactly delineated.

Angelic energies infuse the body with its individuality; that is, the Being becomes undivided and an inspection of its own nature thereby becomes possible. The sensory experience of the pattern of the body, as described above, is necessary in order to understand one's wholeness of Being.

I have explained on a number of occasions the need to comprehend one's whole life in an organic process of reassembly; and this, too, relates to the physical experience of organic sensation, which because of its levels of energy comprehensively discloses the nature of Being, such as it is.

Friday, August 29, 2014

Note from the author: The below response by R, a close friend, confidant, and long-time email correspondent, is drawn from some of my comments as published in "A Perfect Faith, part II" on August 26. Readers might want to refer back to that post before reading the remainder of this exchange.

R: What you say is fine and beautiful.

I too love to walk and "be" in Nature and receive impressions without too much thinking. Maybe I don't do it enough. But for me another essential nutrient is "thought" (to use a word which is not really right) of a certain high octane. Such "thought" is not easy to find in this world in which thinking has become degraded to such a low level and is constantly under attack (but was it ever otherwise?), and it takes a lot of time and energy to find its seeds and to plant, harvest, cook, and digest it. And it is hard to find people to share this work with.

It seems to me that such "thought" is part of Nature too, a second Nature so to say. Even to "walk" in the presence of it is thrilling. But if there were no human beings who devote themselves to its cultivation, this Nature would not exist, or would remain only potential. Its species are constantly threatened with extinction, even more so than biological species. They need more than "dirt", "water", "air", and "sun", they need something that only man can be a channel for, a kind of loving attention which, as is said in Beelzebub, comes from higher than the "sun". It is a calling.

L: Of course what you say is quite right.

That thought you speak of exists in an inner realm that corresponds to Swedenborg's visions of heaven. There is much to what he says on this subject; and the matter of correspondence between the realm of the higher — which he referred to as heaven — and the lower is critical in coming to this understanding.

I increasingly find that there is a very fine kind of nectar or wine in the digestion of one's entire life. One begins to see that specific elements in it create overtones; that particular events add undertones and critical supportive elements; and that all together, it blends into a quite extraordinary entity. If there is a psychology of man's possible evolution, it lies in this evolution of man's possible psychology: and the evolution of our psychology depends on this harmonious blending of the entire timeline of our life with all the elements in it, and the many heavenly or higher influences which enter us. If we receive them, process them, and digest them properly — which is also a kind of thought, just not the one we usually call thought — what results is an enhanced form of Being.

One presumes that there is a cosmological element to this process, which the yogis of course called the astral Being or element, but perhaps this isn't so important and can in fact distract us from the simple truth of our immediate sensation of life.

I always value that great thought most which comes most effortlessly; then, there isn't any tension. Thought emerges whole from the fabric it is woven from; that is, for the best thought, it always seems that it is a thread drawn from a tapestry that already exists of itself. I just encounter it and draw a particular part of it out. If the relationship is a good one, the thread draws easily and reveals its colors without resistance.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Pauline: following a shock, I have really seen what has been my life — empty, sterile, useless. And I don't want to lose this vision, this feeling. Otherwise I feel that I will fall again and again lose my life.Gurdjieff: Cosmic phenomena for which you are not responsible go against your work. You can only give yourself your word that when life becomes quiet, you will set yourself to work.—Gurdjieff, Transcripts of wartime meetings 1941 – 46

A man may go out into the fields and say his prayers and know God, or he may go to church and know God: but if he is more aware of God because he is in a quiet place, as is usual, that comes from his imperfection and not from God: for God is equally in all things and all places, and is equally ready to give Himself as far as in Him lies: and he knows God rightly who knows God equally [in all things].

The usefulness of my life is only measured in correspondence to what is inwardly formed; and after that, perhaps, what is outwardly expressed may have good value.

I put my trust and belief in shocks and my own opinions. Something horrible or disturbing happens; and I draw all kinds of conclusions from it. All too often, in evaluating difficult external events, I somehow end up devaluing myself — and I perversely think that that is a good thing.

Perhaps I don't really understand the difference between self-devaluation and a sense of my own nothingness. One of them is a destructive force; the other one is a feeling–understanding of life which comes from a real place, and puts me in a position that has an intelligence and makes sense. If I feel that my life is empty, sterile, and useless, what good does that do me? It's only when I see my position relative to God and have a wish to come into relationship with God that seeing such things might be meaningful; and then, only in the turning away from the negative.

So do I really need a quiet place to do this? Gurdjieff advises this here; and yet, he does it for one woman, and in one particular circumstance.

This is the danger of such advice; I read about it, and I think it applies to me. But it is a fossil.

I know a good deal about fossils, because I collect them. To me, they're extraordinarily interesting — yet, unequivocally, dead.

I find Meister Eckhart's vision of the question of quietness compelling. I think that this or that or the other thing will make me more aware of God, or, instead, goad me into working. Above all I think that if I can only get everything to a nice, quiet equilibrium, then, finally, I will be able to do some inner work and make some progress.

But I can wait my entire life trying to understand what inner work is, what an inwardly formed Being is, and thinking to myself that I will finally have some time to deal with it when things quiet down.

Things never quiet down.

The inward flow of life needs to become whole and come into relationship with what is true. What is true may or may not be cosmic; and it may or may not be quiet. It's no matter. I have to become active in myself and discover what relationship is, using all factors equally — as best I can — to make that discovery. It is like a person building a survival vessel, who checks around them and takes every material at hand that they can incorporate into that vessel, creatively, dynamically, within the moment, as though the action were a symphony and every instrument in the orchestra could be deployed in one way or another, in every moment, in order to create a piece of music which is entirely new and no one has ever heard.

This isn't the kind of thing one plans out on a sheet of paper. I don't sit down and think to myself, "I'll attempt to come into relationship with my inner Being and with God later, when it's quiet." No – I go forth boldly and engage. Things will be chaotic and messy; lots of things will go wrong. I will be there with that.

Trying to hide and waiting for the quiet place won't work – at least, it won't work for me. Above all, my work has to be in life, quiet or not.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

...you read only with your head. Do an exercise. Read only a little— a page at a time. At first you must try to understand with your head, then to feel, then to experience. And then come back and think. Exercise yourself to read with your three centers. In each book there is material for enriching oneself. It doesn't matter what you read and it doesn't matter the quantity, but the quality of the way of reading.
—Meeting Two, page 6.

Why is this kind of work necessary?

My relationship to the world is determined by what is inwardly formed in me. Generally, I'm completely unconscious than anything whatsoever is being inwardly formed in me; everything just happens. Like Napoleon and the other generals in War and Peace, I sincerely believe that I am in charge of affairs, whereas I am actually being carried along by a current much more powerful than anything I can imagine.

In order to take any real responsibility for my life, I have to be responsible for what is inwardly formed in me, and this involves what Gurdjieff called three centered work. Impressions don't fall deeply into the body unless all three centers participate with one another in effort; and things are not inwardly formed without a deeper relationship to the impressions of life.

This holds true with reading as much as with everything else. The reason that words seem quite different if I read them one year and come back to them four years later is because what is inwardly formed has changed; and thus the understanding of the words is different. I need to read with more of myself participating if I'm truly interested in taking things in more deeply.

It is much better to read a little bit and get a lot out of it than to read a lot and get a little bit out of it. Poetry is based on this premise in exactly the same way: a little bit of poetry that contains a lot of good within it is far superior to a lot of prose that contains a little bit of good in it.

It is the essence of things that matters; and if something has a good essence, one does not need much of it to be fed well. In the same way that the essence of what is written is important, the essence of reading it is equally so. So if I understand, in reading, the way to bring it to my essence — an action which doesn't happen very often, trust me, even with wiseacreing literary types such as myself — then the manner in which it is dealt with becomes more than superficial.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

When Christ spoke about the lilies of the field, and asked us to consider them, most certainly, he wanted us to consider the idea that the most perfect faith is clothed in nature itself, which arises from the heart of truth and expresses that truth in every crevice of its Being.

There is no greater thing than our relationship and consonance with natural things, if the impressions of them fall deeply enough into us. From when I was a small child, I recognize that there was something in nature, in the beauty and perfection of its structures, that transcended the ability of the human mind to comprehend; and the no matter how we pick it apart with our sciences, we can never touch the beauty of the whole. I can never forget this; it has been ingrained in me always, a subtle, underlying cellular texture that is present to my inner sense of touch.

It brings me to this: thinking so much seems wearying at times. I'm investing in sensation; or, rather, it's investing in me.

It strips away much of the need for thought. There is an openness in it that invites a participation of feeling quite distinct from my tendency to analyze.

My interest in nature develops here. We pay far too little attention to our impressions of nature, which are the primary impressions we originally evolved to take in. There is a subtle relationship here which has been either romanticized or intellectualized over the centuries; and both of these forms of interaction ultimately represent a corruption of the need to take the impressions deeper into the body.

Here we discover the primal relationship of self to planet; and this question of "serving the planet", which all too often serves as a merely theoretical premise in inner work, delivers itself instead as a fundamental and practical engagement.

This isn't born from the attitude or philosophy of John Muir or Thoreau, nor environmentalism or naturalistic theism; it is born in sensation and the living energy of the body, which is a part of nature, not apart from it.

So here I am. How is this?

Perhaps it is enough and does not need the additives of thought, which so often become preservatives, instead of nutrients.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Perfect faith comes from a direction and an inner source that does not belong to me.

I have to understand that beliefs all belong to me. Because I am an egoist, I think that everything I believe is good and true; and I pit my beliefs and truths against those of others. It's like a cock fight: we put spurs on and hack at each other's beliefs and truths. Take a look around; see the violence and dissent in the world. This is where all of that begins: in me and my beliefs.

Eckhart makes it clear that I do not have true knowing within the context of my belief. He calls belief "mere" belief; belief is trivial and not a thing to be taken seriously. Yet this is exactly the problem; I do take myself and my beliefs seriously, very seriously indeed. I will do anything — even kill for them.

So what is this perfect faith? And how come I can't distinguish it from belief?

I must bring a practical example from my own life; for no other example will do.

It is a Sunday morning; I am irritated and impatient, for reasons that don't matter much. Suffice it to say that I could see I was negative this morning, and understood where it would lead; things have come to pass exactly as I understood they would, because my negativity has habitual components that express themselves the same way every time. It's not catastrophic; but I am identified with and unhappy about a number of things, and preparing to go on a trip to China tomorrow. Not a good combination.

Things are quiet outside; it just stopped raining and the sky is beginning to clear. I go outside to sit on the front porch. I'm on a swing bench; it's a place I have sat many times in the past with pleasure, although less so of late. I sit down, and take some time to just stop for a moment.

Unexpectedly, a vibration takes place within the abdomen. I'm well familiar with these arrivals; every one of them signifies a particular Grace of the Lord, arriving in one part of the body or another, and always with more or less the same result.

A huge wave of relaxation passes through me as I surrender to it. My own efforts of relaxation are orders of magnitude smaller than the force of this gentle storm which passes through me.

I drop my arms into my lap and recognize, incontrovertibly, that the power much higher than myself is in charge. I distinctly see the difference between myself and this higher level; and it suffuses me, reminds me of my insignificance.

For a moment, I let go of everything.

Not much later, I am at the kitchen sink, and am overcome with a sense of sorrow. This sorrow isn't any specific sorrow; it is sorrow from everything, about everything, and for everything. It's a ubiquitous presence, a substance that penetrates all of Being. It is, improbably, perfect; and it is this perfection, the perfection of sorrow, the perfection of understanding how temporary life and everything in it is, that constitutes a perfect faith.

This is a truth that transcends all the teachings, the forms, the formulas, and the prescriptions for life. It is a truth that is whole; it contains all of who I am and all of everything that is.

It won't last, I know; I am pulled through life by tides much larger than me, and it is merely privilege and grace that allows me to be touched for a moment by these sacred forces, reminding me that I am so often powerless.

I am outside in the garden now; and the wild senna is in bloom, yellow flowers attracting the bees.

There is a graceful dance here, and it isn't mine.

Inside, there is a similar dance that takes place: and perhaps, at times, I can sense that.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

But you might say, 'Alas, sir, I feel so bare and cold and lazy that I dare not face our Lord !' I reply, All the more need for you to go to your God, for by Him you will be enflamed and set afire, and in Him you will be sanctified and joined and made one with Him, for you will find such grace in the sacrament, and nowhere else so truly, that your bodily powers are there united and collected by the precious power of the physical presence of our Lord's body, so that all a man's scattered senses and his mind are here concentrated and unified, and those which especially were too much inclined downward will be lifted up and duly offered to God.

And by the indwelling God they will be so inwardly trained and weaned of the bodily hindrances of temporal things and limbered up toward divine things, and so, strengthened by God's body, your body will be renewed.

For we should be turned into Him and become fully united with Him, so that His own becomes ours, and ours all becomes His: our heart and His one heart and our body and His one body. Thus our senses and our will, intention, our powers and our limbs are borne into Him so that we sense and become aware of Him in all the powers of body and soul.

Only a proper and practical understanding of the organic sense of Being and the inward flow of the Divine Presence will reveal how precise Eckhart's words are here.

He is describing, in a few brief paragraphs, everything Jeanne de Salzmann attempted to transmit in her own notes; and the unity he speaks of is directly related to Gurdjieff's explanation that sensation is the source of one's sense of individuality. We cannot mistake, here, the gathering of attention within the body and within Being; and its uplifting effect upon the soul.

It's impossible to divorce any of this understanding from Swedenborg's explanations regarding the inward flow of the Divine; there can be only one understanding on these issues, even though words always come to it from so many different directions. The inward sense of God's Presence is an objective quality; and no matter how it is described it is always sensed in exactly the same way, just as each man who reaches for an object in the darkness will sense that object through touch in exactly the same way. This is why sensation (and the subtle yet pervasive sense of touch itself, which is a part of sensation) is such an important factor in the understanding of God's Presence; unlike thought, which can turn and twist in many ways, sensation is a straight thing which under any ordinary circumstances does not deviate.

This is also why pain and pleasure can be such accurate teachers; a man or woman can think anything he or she likes, and recast it in a thousand different lights, but we all feel pain the same way.

And again, in a different manner, sensation always begins in silence; for silence is its nature, and silence is by its nature the most feminine and receptive of qualities.

Things that are sensed, in other words, carry a truth the mind cannot interfere with; and perhaps this is why God comes to us so certainly, first, within sensation; whereas in our beliefs and in our minds, there is no such quiet, and hence no unerring chance of experiencing His Presence.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

...Sometimes when I wish to sense myself or see myself or work, my mind tells me that that is just a technique and that I'm just escaping the real which is the thoughts and problems in the mind.

How do I handle (reconcile?) this lie?

Response:

The key to what you're asking lies within your own sensation of your body... with the mind of your sensation. Not the mind of your thought.

Invest in your sensation directly, simply, openly, and honestly, without any argument.

Try this: put a number of objects in a bag: small, medium size, different types.

Then reach in with your eyes open, but not looking in the bag, and sense how you select a particular object you are looking for: say, metal nail clippers, this is a good one; with touch. You use touch to see; you see with your sensation.

This may seem to be useful only in a limited way, but actually its usefulness is universal.

You can learn to see the difference between the mind of sensation—which knows through sensation what is—and the mind of thought and the effects of vision.

Discriminate carefully and learn to see what sensation is; then let it acquire gravity within you relative to thought.

Friday, August 22, 2014

I wake up every morning wondering about God and my relationship to Him.

This isn't a relationship of the mind; it is a relationship of the whole Being, and it always begins with the incorporation — the embodiment — of energy within sensation. There is a deep, heartfelt, honest, and inescapable vibration that emanates from heaven, and enters the body: this is a force one cannot argue with. It asks questions; and at the root and heart of those questions is always, every time, love. There isn't really anything but love; and yet despite the fact that it runs the universe and is the engine that drives life itself, I forget that quite often.

So it's in the morning that I try to sense what life is and remember this love that begins everything. When I try to do it with my mind, conceptually, I dream up fabulous universes and before you know it arguments ensue; thought juxtaposes things, and as soon as juxtapositions arise, there is conflict.

In sensation, and in Being, there is no conflict; only a quiet sense of wonder that asks who I am and why I am here.

Readers who follow these essays know that, when I am in the country (and not boxed in some hotel room in Shanghai) I get up very early and walk the famous dog Isabel. This is always at dawn and often in darkness; and there is a quietness and majesty on every path to the river, as well as the ones along it. There are times when I wish I could erase everything but nature and the presence of God within it; this is, of course, impossibly impractical, but there is a wish for the perfection of God and the expression of His will that pervades all of creation, and it is only in the quiet time, alone, that I can begin to remind myself of this premise, from which all of the roots, tendrils, trunks and branches of my life emerge.

I'm reminded of how small I am. I've mentioned it before; Peggy Flinsch once began a sitting in the 1980s in New York City — it was a Thursday morning, she sometimes came in at 7 AM to sit with us then — by saying, "we are tiny little creatures." Anyone who knew Peggy will know how absolutely objective and incisive the inflection with which she said that was; it was an uncompromising truth, and it went into us all, I think, like a sword, although I can speak only for myself.

This is the whole point of the Gurdjieff work — to understand that we are tiny little creatures, that we are nothing.

The whole point of real inner understanding is to understand one's insignificance; this can touch conscience in a way that arouses real feeling, whereas the arrogance of our ego is merely a ball peen hammer with which we put dents in ourselves and everyone around us.

When I sense myself, and I sense the love that has created us, there is no doubt something more real is born. It is always in touch with this mystery of life; and it is in touch through the body, not through the mind.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

My teachers—who were orthodox, but not completely orthodox—always felt that a spiritual work, an organization, existed only as the starting point for a real inner work.

One joins the organization to get one's beginning in spiritual life. The organization is not the end in itself; life itself is the end in itself, and this living-within-life consists of a full, inherent, organic, and conscious relationship to life. Spiritual organizations are like greenhouses; they ought to be places where seedlings are started. From this point of view, they are vital and necessary; and we ought to deeply respect and nurture them.

But the seedling can't grow properly if it's kept in the greenhouse forever. It may produce fruit; but everyone knows greenhouse fruit is never as satisfying as (for example) berries grown in the wild, which are undoubtedly the best, no matter how small, misshapen, or tart they may be. The whole point of the wild fruit is its uniqueness, the strange and wonderful character of its Being; and its Being is formed by a dense, complex, rich, and unexpected interaction with so many influences of life: rain, wind, sunshine... even pests and predators. None of these exist in the greenhouse.

The soul is like this: a wild creature destined to interact with all of creation. The greenhouse may seem like a safe place—we may think it will produce beautiful souls in perfect rows, well groomed, without any spots or blemishes; and the fruits may be fat and sweet. This is, of course, just a dream; but we fall in love with it.

Is this really what nature intended? I doubt it. The soul ought to be tested; and a soul that grows in the light of the sun with bugs crawling on it, offering its fruits to other creatures and sacrificing a part of itself to great nature: this is what is intended, at its root, by the nature of life itself.

In this way perhaps I begin to see that I cannot live in the greenhouse forever. I have to take the risk that my soul may not grow in the way I expect it to; that it may need to encounter many unexpected forces I cannot predict and have no control over. This is its real environment; a wild place of testing, a place that constantly demands interaction with a creation that does not agree with it, that tries it. This is never going to take place in the greenhouse, that place where neat rows of plants are tended by gentle gardeners.

We cannot rely on protected environments for inner work. The habit of fleeing to retreats, of flocking to temples and institutions, only reinforces our domestication; and the domesticated animal can never know what it is to risk itself, to run free, to suffer its own life for what it is in the context for which it was designed.

It's this creation of artificial context we must, I think, be wary of. I create enough artificial contexts for myself as it is; all of society, all of enculturation, is an artificial context. It's tempting to rely on that; it's what's expected, and that always seems so safe, doesn't it?

Yet there is nothing artificial about my inner life; it's an organism, a living thing, my Being, and that needs to be respected, not kept on a leash. Being has to learn to sniff the earth and root through the bushes; not walk neat, manicured paths.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Meister Eckhart uses this phrase in his Talks of Instruction; and it pertains to understanding the certainty of eternal life. Yet the critical point is universal; and what interests me this morning is the question of trust in the good.

Yesterday I had a rather exasperating discussion with a highly intelligent friend who trusts abundantly; but he trusts in the intellect. I often find the smartest people the most frustrating; excessive intelligence tends to obscure everything except itself , and engenders its own special kind of stupidity.

Now, make no mistake about it, it is essential to have a very sharp intellect; essential, that is, in terms of an intellect with a critical facility. By this I mean an intellect with right order and an internal consistency. That order must be formed by the inflow and not by my own will; a point amply made in the Talks of Instruction. Yet the intellect in us is formed by our own will; and we are loath to see the inconsistencies in it. Our ego drives intellect in almost every instance, yet intellect carefully adjusts itself to conceal this. Intellect has, in and of itself, become the chief tool of the ego in its efforts to subvert the divine inspiration of the inner order.

The intellect cannot, in a word, be trusted; and the very best way to understand that is to have the intellect extinguished by revelation. This does not need to go on for very long before one sees the intellect for what it is; it is the emperor's new clothes, an invention of the imagination. Of course it "loses" faith; it has no real faith to begin with, because its faith begins with itself, and this kind of faith does not ever rest in God.

If the intellect is extinguished, ah! Then I am in the desert; and in that emptiness love rushes in, because in the end, if I am empty of myself, the first thing that rushes in to fill that vacuum is love; love naturally seeks every corner and crevice of creation. There is no place it will not fill if room is made! And love, once it arrives, trusts—because it begins in the Lord and, having its origins in what is good, it never doubt the good. The intellect, however, has its origins in a mechanical arrangement, a structural premise, and of itself there is no good in this. Only feeling, only love, can produce the good, because it is rooted in it; and intellect cannot have such roots, because it is arranged to reveal hierarchy, structure, and relativity. It has, of itself, no evaluative ability or function; and yet I wrongly ascribe such functions to it. In this way I continually attempt to evaluate using a part that cannot perform that task.

Trust in the good ought to arise in me naturally, just as love does; yet when I begin with the mind, instead of from an inner desert, no trust appears. It is in this inner desert that I abandon my own trust; and there I find solace.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

I suspect, like me, that you ask yourself why you are the way you are.

I usually speak of myself; and yet if I speak of you, I also speak of myself, because we are no different, except for some measure of experiences and varying degrees of inner connection. So today, perhaps I will speak of you, keeping in mind that it is also me I speak of.

Let us think of it as me, speaking to myself. Because I generally dictate in this space, I am actually speaking; so I am just having a little talk with myself, which you are privy to.

You are the way you are because you love yourself too much. You love yourself; but in all the wrong ways. You love all the suitcases you have stuffed inside yourself over the course of your life; you love your opinions, your moods, and your demands. You love everything, in a word; and you say you love God. But in fact, all of this is incorrect. In order to love anything in a real way, you must go away from it, not towards it; because the real world lies within, and only by going inside, in a direction directly away from everything you love, can you find the real love that is born in hearts from the spark of the divine influence.

This means you must stop loving. It seems odd; yet all of the love for the outer is misplaced. To love God and God alone, you must go inside, to discover the spark that animates. That is where God begins; and if you even touch His toenail, already, that is a huge change.

Now, you go within; and where is this God?

God arises through sensation, that is where He is. Anything you think of God with your mind is pointless; it isn't God. You must sense God with the body, sense God with the feelings, and then maybe God can speak. But until then, as long as you conduct a dialogue with God — which is really a monologue, mind you — nothing is happening. And when things begin to happen, they will destroy what you are. You know that already; it is constantly taught. But you forget it all the time, falling back in love with yourself and what you are.

You should know that the mind can stop. Where the mind stops, the desert begins; and the desert is a vast landscape inhabited by God alone. This is such a perfect place; there is no need to think of your own things here, because all things you need are already present. Everything is still; and although it seems strange, because the landscape has none of the objects you expect to see in it, all that is necessary appears effortlessly when it is needed. So there is no need to do anything except stop and be present.

Monday, August 18, 2014

So there is no emptiness here; there is, in this desert, the essence of life itself, and it brings water to the desert in the same way that the rains bring water everywhere; gloriously, in abundance. The inward flow is the source of life itself; and although it is always in me, it is when I sense it that I understand the glory of living, before anything else happens.

My outward this perpetually tries to convince me that it is what is glorious; but all of its glory comes only from the inward flow. The dirt is glorious; the rain is glorious. Every single instance of outwardness is glorious, but all of that glory is infused, informed, created by the inward flow of the divine. It is only when that flow can't be sensed that the outward acquires the flat aspect that I usually assignment, and begins to seem as though it is the motive force of life. But inwardness provides astonishment; and astonishment is a quiet thing that penetrates to the bone.

Into the sacred silence of this inward desert the Lord flows; and wisdom flows with Him. Wisdom, and all the other things that are needed to support life, before the outward aspects of being meet me. In so far as I turn inward, to this open and empty space where the Lord meets me, so I have Being; and that Being begins before outward being. Outward being is, in fact, nothing; of course, it is everything, and a certain sense, relative to my impressions, but it is only a mirror of Being itself. It is a reflection of consciousness; so everything that is encountered is the mirror, not the object. Our impression — my impression — that everything outward is what is real is an inversion. There can be no real thing without the inward.

As you read this, I hope you will ponder the idea that there is nothing more important than coming into relationship with an inner energy. There is no other purpose in life; and a life lived at 100% of everything else is still equal to zero if the inward flow does not open me and I do not form a strong, intimate, and lasting relationship with it. This is the only way that life acquires real meaning, as opposed to the false meanings that are assigned by outer events. All of the real meanings are born within; and all of the real meanings are born within relationship to the Lord, who flows inward in all of His wisdom and grace and love.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

That man finds greater praise before God, for he takes all things as divine, and as greater than they are in themselves. Indeed, this requires zeal and love and a clear perception of the interior life, and a watchful, true, wise, and real knowledge of what the mind is occupied with among things and people. This cannot be learned by running away, by fleeing into the desert away from outward things; a man

must learn to acquire an inward desert, wherever and with whomever he is.

When I hear the word desert, I usually think of a place that is barren. No people live there, there are no villages or towns, and plants do not grow there. No water can be found. Yet this is the place that is so often cited as a place to go in order to seek spiritual alignment.

The desert is often understood to symbolize a kind of asceticism, a willingness to abandon material things; yet Meister Eckhart maintains that nothing of the kind is the case. This outer abandonment, all of the outer symbols and forms, both the adoption of those symbols and forms or the abandonment of the symbols and forms, is useless. It reminds me of things that Jeanne de Salzmann says about seeing (See Seeing is an Act, fromThe Reality of Being, pages 205-206.)
In pondering this question, I see that the desert does not mean asceticism. It does not mean barrenness, or even a lack of attachment or nonattachment. To me, contemplating this question this morning, it seems quite simple: the desert represents discipline.

And indeed, both Meister Eckhart and Jeanne de Salzmann emphasize a continuing and relentless need for discipline in inner work. Discipline is not a form; it is an obligation. Gurdjieff dismissed people who lack discipline, calling them tramps and lunatics. Neither one had any chance of becoming anything real within themselves. To go into the desert, to acquire an inward desert, is to acquire a place that has a great demand. There is nothing empty or unpopulated about it, nothing that is barren or lacking. On the contrary — as anyone who studies the desert carefully will know — it is a rich environment, but an incredibly demanding one. One has to have one's attention, ones wit, active and around one at all times to survive in these conditions.

I recently read an essay in which a very respectable gentlemen was maintaining that one need not commit to a particular spiritual discipline. He presented a dreamy, colorful image of flitting from religion to religion like a butterfly, sipping the nectar of each one in a rapture of joyful understanding. It all sounds very nice, but in my experience, absolutely nothing can come of such activity. It is like bacon and nuclear physics. Nuclear physicists eat breakfast: They cook bacon and eggs, and so on. If you go cook bacon and eggs with a nuclear physicist and have breakfast while he discusses physics, it doesn't mean you understand nuclear physics; or that you ever will. It takes many decades of discipline to understand nuclear physics and come to any real new understanding regarding the question.

Everyone in today's cultures wants to get things for free. Especially in the last 20 or 30 years, the idea has arisen that one can achieve spiritual depth by paddling about in shallow water. This is absolute nonsense, nothing more than the evil inner God of self calming. One has to be willing to pay with everything; and if this sounds severe, it is because it is. Soft peddling the situation so that people believe their comfort can serve their soul serves no one.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Sensation of the body, the second mind, is active without associations. Now, I say that with caveats: there are associations with previous pleasurable sensation, so we might say there is a form of associative thinking. That is, this exists, but only for unconscious, that is, involuntary sensation, which functions — much like the associative mind — as a series of buttons that get pushed, causing actions. This is why Mr. Gurdjieff referred to our actions as mechanical: all three of the minds in us are automatic to the extent that they are unconscious, that is, they function strictly according to associations.

The mind of sensation, however, has an inherent ability to awaken in a different way and become conscious. When this takes place, and it combines with an even marginally conscious intellect, the center of gravity in Being changes completely. I say marginally conscious intellect, because the intellect has a wide range of conscious functions which can be precisely defined by its passage around its own octave in the enneagram. When it is reinforced by a conscious sensation, a passage takes place in which one enters, for the first time, the spiritual side of inner work. This is because the conscious mind of sensation has—due to its nature and its unusually strong connections to the instinctive center (connections which, in the intellect, are largely atrophied)—an enormous amount of power to support inner work; a power the mind alone can never produce.

It is, in fact, impossible for the mind to produce such force, because it does not work with the parts that contain such force. It is, in fact, quite weak — an observation Gurdjieff often made about the minds of his pupils, and an observation they made themselves. Exercising the mind alone will not really strengthen it much — but connecting it to sensation gives it a powerful foundational support.

An active or voluntary sensation is objective. It does not bring its own associations to the moment; it is vibrant, alive, and actively passive — that is, it becomes the magnetic field, the magnetic center or inner center of gravity, that draws impressions into Being. it does so without interfering with them intellectually, because its capacity is not intellectual. When one is within the center of gravity created by a voluntary sensation, one can see quite easily how the intellect constantly tries to interfere with impressions as they enter: it is the habit of intellect to do this. The ability to see this consciously — that is, with the mind of sensation, which is a different and new kind of consciousness — raises all kinds of questions about the activity of the intellect, and creates a kind of balance that allows one to see that the intellect is usually off-base in its assessments: selfish, egoistic, and processing incoming impressions according to associations that serve lower impulses of a wide variety. This kind of self observation is, in my experience, relatively impossible unless a voluntary sensation is active; and it is only this kind of self observation that truly brings a question from the second mind to the first mind, whereby the first mind has a critical faculty applied to it.

Until this takes place, the critical faculty in the first mind, the intellect, is always self reflexive, that is, it is mind critiquing mind. This kind of critique is circular and, in my opinion, inherently worthless, because it never goes outside itself. It just hypothesizes about it.

Only with the participation of a second center, the second mind, can things begin to change in this regard.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Self observation becomes, in the end, a careful observation of my intentions.

If there is one thing I have learned from many years of relationship to an active sensation, it's that I can't trust my intentions. When I am aware of them — when any conscious mentation accompanies them — I see how self-serving they are, and how utterly uncaring of others they appear to be. Although there are parts of me that know this is wrong, still, the mechanical manifestation of egoism is relentless.

It's a strange experience to see that part of one wishes for what one knows is wrong. This is the kind of thing, I feel sure, that Gurdjieff was talking about when he spoke of actions unbecoming to three brained beings.

Yesterday, while teaching a class on in our yoga, I stressed the idea that sensation, the second mind of human beings, has an objective property.

This takes some explaining, I think, because the conventional understanding of sensation does not include the manner in which it becomes an active mind.The difficulty is that people think of sensation as a thing — that is, some kind of object. Remember, you can think of nothing, but you can't thing a think. Thought and material objects are quite different. Sensation is a form of thought; it just doesn't assume an aspect we are familiar with, so we think of it as a thing; that is, the associative part, the intellectual center, classifies it as existing outside itself and being of a different order, that is, not thought, and not a conscious mind, but some subset or aspect of thought and conscious mind.

The premise that sensation itself is a form of conscious thinking — the conscious thinking of the body — is a foreign one. As is the premise that feeling, real and deep emotion, is also a form of thinking. We have compartmentalized our understanding of consciousness in such a way that only associative thinking is understood to be of the mind; and so the second mind (the mind of the body) and the third mind (the mind of feelings) are not just misunderstood, they are sidelined, devalued, and classified as entities inferior to the noble intellect.

Take note, in passing, that these two minds — moving and emotional center — are both found in animals, whereas the intellectual center isn't. This is the probable reason for the overvaluation of intellect in man; and we do not see how it removes us from our essential nature by dominating.

When Mr. Gurdjieff gave his pupils the exercise of intoning, "I am — I wish to be," he presented it is something that we say, more or less, with the mind. That is, we understand it and say it with the intellectual mind. And this is the only part we can take it in with, at least initially. The other parts — the body and the feelings — don't really enter into it at first. And so it has a flat, one dimensional quality.

We gain some inkling of what he was getting at when we read that he judged the man or a woman by where in the body they sensed these words while they were saying them.

Sensation, in other words, is the key component in understanding what these words mean to me. The words are meant to awaken a connection with sensation; and they only acquire depth in so far as this awakening takes place.

Teaching the class I was working with yesterday, it occurred to me above all that students of inner yoga need to understand just why the thinking mind is subjective, and the mind of sensation is objective; and what the implications for Being are, in regard to these two things. The question of why the second mind is so vital to inner work, and the very important connections it has to the question of the formation of the second Being-body, the astral body, are manifold. I'll pursue these greater length tomorrow.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent to gain all things, and the noblest work of all is that which proceeds from a bare mind. The more bare it is, the more powerful, worthy, useful, praiseworthy and perfect the prayer and the work. A bare mind can do all things. What is a bare mind ?

A bare mind is one which is worried by nothing and is tied to nothing, which has not bound its best part to any mode, does not seek its own in anything, that is fully immersed in God's dearest will and gone out of its own. A man can do no work however paltry that does not derive power and strength from this source.—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, p. 487 This instruction echoes the point of yesterday's essay, which is that I must empty myself of all things, everything that is attached to creation, in order to become truly obedient. Obedience takes place when I abandon everything except my participation; and my participation is obedience.When I align myself inwardly through discipline, that is, the inward and self-created practice of attention, effort, and demand, then there is a true inward alignment. I can never actually align myself through outward forms; all they are just templates. To the extent that I am drawn to the outward form, and believe that the outward form provides this or that which I need for my inner discipline, to that extent, I am deluded, because my inward discipline must always begin inside me, with and from myself, and it must always begin with the demand that I work inwardly. Not that I work according to how others have taught me to work, or the way that outward forms tell me to work; my work must be formed inwardly through grace, obedience, and effort, where I abandon all concepts of outward form and attempt to open myself to a higher energy.Those who read The Reality of Beingwould do well to consider how assiduously Jeanne de Salzmann attended, in her notes to herself, to this question. She well understood how much her work relied on her own effort to be not as she was.I see that I am always attracted to outward form; and yet I never see that this should always be a mirror of inward truth, and that inward truth must come first. When inward truth is present, all form and outwardness is equal; and in this way, colors, cushions, automobiles, jobs and loved ones — all things— become equal not because they are actually equal in terms of outward form, but because all are equally and exactly a part of a whole life.In this way, equality is understood quite differently than it is in the outward world, where we see that such equality as we presume or attempt to assign is in fact impossible and imaginary. The principle of equality of all things—an idea shared in common by a range of disciplines— can only be understood from an inward point of view, and this is only when something is understood inwardly from the point of view of the inflow, the divine principle.So I cannot judge outwardness through mankind's intentions, but only through God's.Hosanna.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

In true obedience there should be no trace of 'I want so-and-so,' or 'this and that,' but a pure going out of your own. And therefore, in the best prayer a man can pray it should not be 'give me this virtue or that habit,' or even 'Lord, give me Yourself,' or 'eternal life,' but 'Lord, give only what You will, and do, 0 Lord, whatever and however You will in every way.' This surpasses the former as heaven does the earth. And when such a prayer is uttered one has prayed well, having gone right out of self into God in true obedience.

True obedience, as Eckhart calls it, can never be given to some thing, to something created, or to an outward form. I cannot be obedient first to objects, events, circumstances, or conditions; because obedience is first and foremost an inward quality.

Obedience is generally misunderstood, because our thinking mind always and invariably attaches it to outward form. This is a profound misunderstanding, but it is a ubiquitous one. Obedience is, in its first instance and in the origin of all obedience, always obedience to the inflow. That is to say, obedience begins with obedience to the divine principle which flows inward into Being.

This principle has no character other than Being. So as soon as one thinks one is being obedient to this thing or that thing, already, obedience has become attached to small fractions of the question. In reality, obedience is obedience to the whole of one's life; everything. And the whole of one's life, if we sense it properly, is comprehensive and consists of a universe — an entity which is a living organism, and far too vast to comprehend with one's intellectual mind.

When I say that one's entire life is a living organism, it may seem obvious — after all, I am a living organism, am I not? And yet I don't see that my thinking mind, and the moment I am in, are just a fraction of a whole living being, a body, which is actually a body that exists through time and has a wholeness that belongs to God. The entire life I live itself is a Being, all of which does not belong to me, but belongs to God. It may be helpful, for conceptual purposes, to understand that the consciousness "I" experience in this instance which I call myself is not "me" at all, but an instantaneous construction that represents a single and infinitesimal fraction of the whole of "I," which consists of all Being experienced throughout the organism and the course of its life.

This is one of the reasons that Gurdjieff described conscience the way he did, that is, more or less, the sensing of everything, of one's entire life and everything in it. The practical aspect of this experience — which is impossible to invoke or create, but can only be encountered — is mediated by the feeling quality, that is, the entry of higher emotion into Being. Much of what Meister Eckhart spoke about regarding the idea of God rushing in to a place where "I" abandon myself and empty myself completely of all ideas of myself relates to this. The talks of instruction (from which the opening quote is taken) discuss this idea in some detail in the first sections.

In any event, my obedience must be an inward obedience, and the obedience is obedience to my whole life, as it is. This life, with every single one of its constituents and components, is exactly and precisely the intention that God has for me; and to the extent that I try to manipulate, control, or invoke it on my own, to the extent that I attempt to touch it, rather than experiencing it, so I abandon true obedience.

In regard to this, another quote from the complete mystical works, taken from the next page:

In truth, if a man gave up a kingdom or the whole world and did not give up self, he would have given up nothing. But if a man gives up himself, then whatever he keeps, wealth, honor, or whatever it may be, still he has given up everything.

This idea of keeping everything in the midst of abandonment seems, of course, quite impossible; yet taken from the point of view of higher feeling, conscience, and the inward flow of the divine, it is exactly right. It can't be rationally processed; and there is no point in trying to do so. The only absolute point is to come into touch with the inward flow and to derive understanding from this, which is a complete understanding, not any of the partial understandings we attempt to arrive at in this analysis through mind.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I suppose the question at this point may now be, why would an organic sensation of being give one a sense of individuality?

Our ordinary sense of individuality — of being a person — is almost invariably formed by our personality, that is, the associative thoughts which form and flow in relationship to external events. We take personality for granted; so much so that it is nearly impossible for us to think of being an individual as connected to any other part of what we are, of any other thing we know.

In this way, Gurdjieff's concept of essence is almost entirely forgotten in modern psychology; so one never hears psychologists and analysts talking about getting in touch with one's essence, and so on. Or, if one does discuss an essence of anything, it is the essence of personality that people infer. Essence as a separate conscious (or, more correctly said, unconscious) entity unto itself is either not understood or misunderstood.

When I say that it is misunderstood, what I mean is that people conceive of essence through personality; and it isn't possible to experience essence through personality. It is like saying that you can experience Beethoven by listening to Prokofiev or Mahler. The very idea is absurd; and yet it persists, because the experience of essence is unknown.

When Gurdjieff says that everything a personn thinks and does are lies (and he already brings up this concept on page 2 of the transcripts) what he means, at the root, is that one has no experience of essence; because essence is closely connected to sensation, and sensation cannot lie. Its mind is connected to instinct, that is, its roots lie at the deepest part of what it is to be; and as we shall see, later in these commentaries on the transcripts, instinct is perhaps the most important part with which one can make an inner effort.

In the arousal of sensation and the investment in the organic sense of being, we experience individuality in this sense: we are not divided into two; indivi— not divided, and dual— two parts. The two parts come together; one is of the intellect, and personality, and one is of the body, of sensation, and essence.

The idea that one cannot think about sensation in order to understand it is made clear enough in what Gurdjieff says in this first transcript; what is necessary is the experience of and investment in it, which immediately brings one to a part of oneself that does not lie.

The reason we cannot invoke this or make it happen is because one cannot just tell a liar not to lie; the liar will always lie. It is in his nature. So it is in the nature of associative thinking to lie; and the only way to change the center of gravity on this issue is to bring to the table a part which doesn't participate in the lying. Now, the liar loves to run the show; he's used to it. So the minute a recognition of the lying takes place, the liar says, "Okay. Don't worry. I'm going to tell the truth now," which is automatically a lie, because nothing else can come from that part. The liar even invents imaginary parts that supposedly don't lie, and presents them saying, "Here you go. Look. I'm not lying! Isn't this great?"

The part which tells the truth — who engages only in being — is essence, tied firmly to organic sensation. Only this part doesn't lie; and since it is unknown, we buy into every statement the liar makes. It is only when the one who tells the truth shows up unambiguously and with his or her own authority than anything begins to change; and then the liar is astonished.

He or she discovers that they were only ever half of the picture; and that the other half has all the authority in this area of not lying.

If one is a smart enough liar, one immediately sees the advantage of forming an alliance with this part, since it can help one achieve things that are impossible under one's own volition. Suddenly one becomes capable of seeing a new kind of unity which rises above the trap one has been locked in for so long. This can be a subject of fascination; and it takes considerable study, because the organic sense of being needs to be welded to personality, and that takes years of practice.

Just putting two people in the same room, who suddenly notice each other and become attracted, this does not make a marriage. Even having a priest officiate over it isn't enough; the marriage only takes shape over many years of hard work.

Monday, August 11, 2014

The organic sense of being makes you independent when you are with other people.

What this means is that one does not have a definite sense of "I" — of real Being — until this develops. The whole aim of inner work is, first of all, to develop this real "I", and one cannot have a real sense of self until at least one other mind is awakened.

That being said, it must be pointed out that the feeling mind cannot awaken before the organic mind of sensation awakens, because the hierarchy of consciousness works according to laws. The three centers have to awaken in order if they wish to find conjunction and act in harmony; so feeling can't awaken on its own, or with any functional stability, in the absence of a connection between mind and body, simply because the functional relationship between the three is built on a range of harmonics that reinforce one another. There isn't enough strength for feeling to enter if intellect and sensation aren't already acting in concert together.

The understanding of this is quite distinct and very different from an understanding of the way the lower parts of the ordinary centers act — that is, intellect, the physical body, and emotion. These three properties belong to the material, or right side, of the enneagram, and their manifestation is what the alchemists called a relationship of coarse substances. Only the enlivening property of a higher energy can inwardly form the awakened consciousness within each center that is necessary for a conjunctive harmony between awakened centers to develop; and the progression is a logical one, based on law, not a random collision of hopes, beliefs, and wishes.

This is why so many decades are spent building an intellectual foundation, which event has to be translated into sensation of the body, first through effort and suffering. Then, once sensation becomes a living thing that is awakened, a prepared ground comes into existence—into which the awakened manifestation of feeling can manifest.

There are varying degrees and levels of sleep, as Gurdjieff pointed out; and they, as well, have distinctive hierarchies that can be identified. A man can be asleep in his intellect, or asleep in his emotion, or asleep in his body, or asleep in all three, as is, in fact, very common, in fact routine and almost the default. And there are degrees of sleep within that; they, too, are formed according to law, and I will simply give the most obvious initial explanation, that is, the intellect can be asleep in its intellectual part, its emotional part, or its physical part. Those who study and ponder these questions will begin to understand that it is not too difficult to see which parts are asleep in people if we understand that each center has three parts... and so on. These matters operate according to sciences which are nowhere near as obscure as those who insist on mystifying the Gurdjieff practice would have us believe.

In any event, an awakened intellect — that is, an intelligence that has come into direct contact with higher energy through effort and suffering — can assist in effort to undertake more suffering, up until an awakened organic sense of being arrives. I've said before that I don't think exercises can do this; and an astute reading of the first transcript verifies that exercises are not the point. It is the suffering that plays the central role in the acquisition of Being; and it is suffering that always and forever plays a central role in the awakening of the organic sense of being.

This goes some way towards explaining the unusual role of physical suffering in monastic and yogic practices; yet these are quite limited in their effectiveness, because physical suffering alone can be tolerated, and one may even learn to enjoy it, as masochists and sadists so amply demonstrate. It is emotional suffering, above all, that has to be engaged in; hence the practice of the non-expression of negative emotion, which has a direct effect on this area—unlike mechanical demands on the body, which look very impressive and cause great anguish, but have considerably less effect.

The harmonious interaction of intellect and sensation, if awakened, leaves an opening for feeling, but its arrival is not guaranteed. This once again takes years of effort and suffering, although a prepared ground is far more likely to receive the benefit of the feeling parts.

When these three parts act together, the transformation of Being begins. I say it begins here, because there is a difference between the acquisition of Being and the transformation of Being.

The acquisition of Being only makes the transformation of Being possible; and it is not guaranteed. So the creation of real "I," which seems to be such a vital aim in inner work, is merely the beginning of any real inner work for a human being.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

I suppose that in embarking on such commentaries, one might as well point out that all published books are subject to critique and evaluation. Few are left who knew Gurdjieff the man personally; not only have I worked with a number of people who did, there are some few still alive who are friends of mine. Yet in the increasing absence of any living people at all who have spent time with him, it is left to us to try to understand him primarily from the records that are left.

Of necessity, and inevitably, these evaluations arise from opinion; any pretense to objectivity is foolishness. Nonetheless, those of us who have followed Mr. Gurdjieff's teachings for many decades, and who stand in a direct line of work that descended from him personally (I am a member of Dr. Welch's group) have a responsibility to carry on the efforts of understanding the work and passing what we can glean on to others.

As such, readers will have to understand that what follows is derived from my own understanding, which is, once again, inevitably partial. Nonetheless, having spent many years and countless hours not only pondering the sense and aim of existence, but living within it according to the principles, intentions, and manifestations which the work attempts to passed on to individuals, I have at least some meaningful sense of these matters.

Each of the transcripts contains a wealth of material that could be commented on; and, as loquacious as it appears I am — there is no sense in denying it at this late stage of my life — I could probably comment at great length on individual sentences in the book, and probably on most of the sentences, at that.

I will attempt to restrain myself, and keep my comments to the things that strike me as most interesting.

Let us begin with an overall observation about the first paragraph in the book, on page 1. Mr. Gurdjieff says, "...you must learn to work. Not only for yourself alone, but for others... You must work for yourself through the aim of being able to help them."

He follows this on page 2 with "Love of your neighbor; that is the Way."

The theme of love of others comes up more than once in this book. The overarching premise is that our egoism is a damaging factor, that our selfishness destroys; and this principle is identical to the principle which Swedenborg advances in his description of heavenly versus hellish behavior. Gurdjieff's doctrine, which is an essential doctrine of unselfishness, can't possibly be divorced from Swedenborg's understanding of what the forces of the divine wish for us.

A second point that struck me in meeting number one derive from the following comments: "I will explain, but it is for later. In our solar system certain substances emanate from the sun and the planets, in the same way as those emanated by the earth, making contact at certain points in the solar system. And these points can reflect themselves and materialized images which are the inverted images of the All Highest — the Absolute."

Gurdjieff goes on to describe these manifestations as, among other things, personalized. And he ascribes astral powers to them. But there can be no mistaking the initial premise, which is the doctrine of correspondences, an ancient doctrine which Swedenborg also wrote about at considerable length. Everything in the material world is, in one way or another, a reflection of the divine; this is a Sufi understanding as well, but is generally taken to be allegorical. There are much more literal interpretations of this doctrine which have deep roots in the sciences, roots which Swedenborg understood. Gurdjieff, a man also deeply interested in the sciences, manifested enough genius to grasp the principles which Swedenborg expounded on in more detail.

The point I wish to make here, a point I have made before on many occasions, is that the connection between Swedenborg and Gurdjieff runs unusually deep, and has never been subjected to sufficient critical analysis, especially inside the ranks of the Gurdjieff practice itself. This is a work that ought to be undertaken by a group of people willing to dedicate themselves to examining the connections, as it will perform a great service to esoteric understanding in general. I would undertake it myself at greater length, but I currently have too many tasks on my plate, most of which involve drawing threads from an even wider range of fabrics together.

***

Perhaps the most important and singular remark made in this first transcript is a comment that corresponds to my own understanding of the organic sense of being, a subject that has been mentioned so many times in my essays readers probably feel it has been beaten to death.

On page 5, Mr. Gurdjieff remarks, "...one must try to keep constantly the organic sensation of the body... Our aim is to have constantly a sensation of oneself, of one's individuality, this sensation cannot be expressed intellectually, because it is organic. It is something which makes you independent when you are with other people."

It has come to my attention that almost everyone I speak to has little or no understanding of the type of sensation that Gurdjieff speaks of; that is, an organic and a voluntary sensation, such as described by Jeanne de Salzmann in The Reality of Being.

This kind of sensation is not like ordinary sensation, and I do not try to have it. If I do not have it, I must try; because the effort is necessary. But I can't "do" it: and de Salzmann's efforts and writings stand as the most important coda and testimony to Gurdjieff's remarks on the matter, since she spent so much time trying to impart this foundational understanding to her pupils.

I know for a fact that the idea of voluntary and organic sensation is poorly understood, simply because I heard about such things for decades and did not understand them — although I thought I understood them. I'll never forget the time my own teacher challenged me on this in the 1980s, and managed to transmit something to me which made me see, for a moment, that I definitely didn't know what she was talking about. She definitely understood this question, at least from a particular point of view — and there is more than one. But at that time, I didn't, and I realized that. It took me another 15 years to gain a direct understanding — that is, a permanent understanding, not a temporary one or a flash of insight — on this matter, and it was only after suffering almost unbearable conditions in life, and absorbing them.

It brings to mind one of the other comments in this particular transcript, "without fire, there will never be anything. This fire is suffering, voluntary suffering, without which it is impossible to create anything. One must prepare, must know what will make one suffer and when it is there, make use of it."

The difficulty in understanding the organic sense of being lies specifically in the fact that it cannot be expressed intellectually. One must be within the experience; and the experience of the organic sense of being emerges from what I call the second mind, that is, the mind of the body, which does not express things intellectually. It is unable to express things intellectually; and although the intellect can serve as a translator for it, translation is in many ways functionally impossible, because the languages are so fundamentally different that they are describing not different continents, but different planets, or perhaps even solar systems or universes. That is, ordinary sensation and voluntary sensation are completely divided by the difference between unconscious sensation and conscious sensation.

Conscious sensation is conscious by itself; I do not make it conscious. And this is the point Mr. Gurdjieff attempts to make here.

This essay is running a bit too long, so I will have to take up the question of the last sentence — it is something which makes you independent when you are with other people – in the next post.

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.